


If I Cannot Fly

by Luthor



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2014-03-23
Packaged: 2018-01-16 17:07:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1355149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luthor/pseuds/Luthor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Outlaw Queen: Robin proposes and Regina hesitates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If I Cannot Fly

**Author's Note:**

> Procrastination, procrastination, procrastination. I should not be writing this. I think I just smut-ed and I don't know what to do about it...? agh.
> 
> Title comes from the Sweeney Todd song 'Green Finch and Linnet Bird'. Ask me why - my 6am brain has a wonderful answer that I'll probably forget (read: recognise as utter bollocks) after I've slept.

The ring remains encased inside the velvet box, upturned in his hand. He’d worried so much about the prospect of his guessed size not fitting her finger, or forgetting the speech he’d prepared in advance, that he hadn’t actually considered the idea that she might not say yes.

That she might, instead, stare at him with wide eyes, her face blank and paling.

There’s no verbal refusal, just the way her eyes drop to the ring that makes her lips firm into a stiff line. She turns as though disgusted – mortified – and takes up her drink. She wants to finish the wine, but her tongue revolts against the taste of it, now, and her throat constricts around the first swallow. She looks away, still and awfully quiet.

Finally, Robin gives up. He closes the box and draws it back – drops it, now, on the table by his empty plate. It almost lands in the left over sauce from the meal he’d made her – something sweet and spicy that he can’t remember the name of, somehow, but that still fizzes on his tongue. He takes up his own glass and tips his head back, swallowing down this sudden numbness. He barely feels the wine touch his throat, or the heat of it in his stomach, but for the sudden wave of nausea that rocks his gut.

They can’t look each other in the eye – Regina so focused on her dining room wall, where photographs of Henry through the years hang like trophies. Robin can’t bring himself to look at that little velvet box now, but can’t quite turn away from it, either. It sits between them like a small, dried up foetus – evidence of an aborted future.

“I’m sorry.”

He isn’t. Is he? And for what? Rushing her; pushing her; ruining whatever they had here with his need to name it?

There’s nothing else to say, and so he repeats his words, slumped in his chair like an aged man. He’d thought they’d come so far, conquered so much. Henry has his memories and his own precious excitement about their pairing, and Roland looks at Regina like she’s a knight in shining armour, come to fight off whatever lurks beneath his bed.

A year has passed so effortlessly with the four of them, the perfect imitation of that sought after nuclear family. He’d thought there’d been more to them than a paradigmatic veneer, until that look had taken a grip of Regina’s features and turned her gaze from him.

Without a word, Regina stands, taking her plate and his. She’d made a promise to wash them, as he had cooked, and now fulfils it to the soundtrack of running water. When Robin follows her through, she’s already elbow-deep in scalding water and scrubbing at a plate. He watches her for a moment, so eager to clean, to eviscerate any evidence of the proposal, and then finds purpose in his footsteps.

Suddenly, he’s behind her. His hands find her hips, then wrap around her waist, while he dips and buries his nose in her warm, perfumed neck. His breathing is rough and hard, his stubble coarse against her throat.

All movement stops, but the panting of his chest against her back. Regina releases the plate and the sponge, lets them sink back into the soapy water that her hands emerge from, red raw. She places one on his arm, the other at the edge of the counter, anchoring herself to it like he anchors himself to her.

“It never happened,” he’s saying, like he can wipe away the memory as easily as she wiped away the stains from their plates. “I never asked. Nothing’s changed.”

“Robin…”

“I’m sorry – please, nothing has to change. I shouldn’t have—I thought we were—”

She cuts him off again, repeating his name, so he moves his mouth against her neck, instead. The kisses are desperate and bristly, his lips soft yet eager. He writes his apology against the column of her throat, licks and sucks the proposal from her skin, swallowing the words down again.

Regina’s head tips to one side, and he grazes her jawline with his desperate mouth. A hand comes away from her middle, sliding down her thigh, while he presses her against the counter. Regina gasps and pushes back – not enough to push him away, but to press her back flush against his chest. She’s panting and gasping when his hand slides up to cup her breast through the dress, squeezing.  Her head falls back against his shoulder, eyes closing, while she rolls her ass back against his crotch.

After that, he isn’t sure how her dress got rucked up to her thighs, or how his belt and trousers got undone, slack around his hips. He presses himself against her, lets her feel his need, while one hand trails up beneath the creased hem of her dress. Her thigh is warm and smooth as silk beneath his coarse palm, softer even than the underwear that meets his questing fingertips. Before he can draw them completely down, Regina turns.

Her eyes are wide and warm, her panting lips trembling for a second before she presses them to his, devouring his mouth. Her tongue claims his, and for a second or two he forgets about the blotched proposal.

His hands slide down to her ass beneath the dress, her panties around her thighs. He squeezes the supple flesh, filling his palms, and pulls her up and into him while Regina’s fingers (still slightly wet and so, so warm) slip to his trousers. She works them off just far enough to release him from his underwear, and then he lifts her up, dragging the panties past her high-heeled feet once she’s seated on the counter.

“Marry me,” he breathes into her mouth, sliding his hand between her legs. She’s wet and warm, and closes her thighs around his hips, dragging him closer.

Regina’s teeth are at his neck. She bites the skin there, punishing him, and then licks it better. “No.” Between them, her hand fits around him, stroking and squeezing, drawing him towards her entrance.

He pulls his mouth back to ask again, but falters as he enters her. They both sigh as it happens, their foreheads pressing together, vying for support. “Marry me,” he says again, pulling slowly back and thrusting into her. Her arms around his shoulders tighten, her hips almost sliding off the counter.

“Marry me,” into her mouth, “marry me,” against her jaw.

One of her hands comes back to the counter, the other hooking around his shoulders; she has just enough of a grip to keep from faltering, and enough leverage to move against him. Her ‘no’s come in kisses long and deep against his mouth, the way her fingers splay into the hair at the nape of his neck and tug.

Robin’s hand returns to her thighs. He opens his eyes and sees the look on her face; he’s much closer than she is, and he needs to catch her up; there’s no waiting, no slowing down. His fingers find her clit and gently, at first, begin to circle. When her response is a wet cry against his ear, he adds more pressure, quickens his movements.

Regina reaches climax first, and it’s the look on her face, as much as the clenching of her walls (the way she breathes his name like an oath), that sends him over the edge. He releases into her with a jerk and a grunt, and pulls an arm around her back. He needs her closer, needs to feel her heart beating against his chest as strong as his own.

 

Later, when the blood returns to its leisurely pace through their veins, he pulls out of her and lifts his head. Perspiration meets with his fingertips as he pushes dark hair back from her forehead, and he helps her from the counter. It’s easy enough to slip the rest of the way to the ground, but her legs are uncertain and over-eager to have her relying on his chest for support.

“I can take the ring back,” Robin says, because this wasn’t a goodbye, and Regina isn’t pushing him away. “We’ll talk about it again, later.”

“No.” She shakes her head, almost exasperated, and drags her tongue along her bottom lip. “I won’t change my mind,” she says.

“You don’t want to marry me.” He doesn’t mean to sound so confused, but—he is. “I thought we were a family.”

“We are.” She slides a hand up his broad chest, so firm and warm beneath her palm. Despite himself, Robin frowns. His hands slide around to the small of her back, where they help to unfold the creases in her dress, smoothing it out again so that its hem falls at mid-thigh. “I don’t need marriage for that. Do you?”

“I thought—you might want to make it official.” _I_ want to make it official, he thinks. “With Roland and Henry…”

“What can we give them through marriage that we can’t without?” Regina shakes her head, dismissing the idea. “Henry accepts us. Gods know he has a ridiculous number of father figures in his life right now, but he accepts _you_ , and Roland—”

“Adopt him.”

Regina stops, mouth gaping. “What?”

“I thought you’d want that – to adopt him, become his parent on paper as well as in life. Do you—?”

“Yes.” She barely has to think of it. “If he—”

“He will.” So eager to reassure her. “He does.”

“Yes – I will.”

The tension seems to pop with his first breathy chuckle, and he kisses the laugh from her lips before it can make a full appearance. It’s less of a kiss, and more of a gentle greeting of their mouths as they smile against each other, and then pull back.

But still, that frown returns to Robin’s brow. Regina nuzzles into him to try and work out the creases, and he asks, “Then why won’t you marry me?” There’s genuine curiosity there, now that they’ve established that this isn’t it for them – that there’s still, on the contrary, a long and winding road beneath their soles.

Previously held up on the toes of her feet, Regina lets herself sink back to her heels, losing the height that had allowed her to brush her nose against his. A strained look appears across her face, and Robin questions whether or not he’s about to get a truthful answer, before she says, “I’ve belonged to a man before – taken his name, his title. I might have said ‘I do’, but there was never an alternative for me.” Her face sets and cracks, and then sets all over again. “I promised myself that I wouldn’t ever be in that position again.”

And when Robin opens his mouth: “I know, I know.” She lifts a hand to his lips, his cheek. “You’re not _him_. I know.”

Robin wants to argue, but she is resolute. He won’t make her – cannot force her – but there’s no hiding his disappointment.

“This doesn’t make us any less,” Regina says, stroking his stubbled cheek and breathing him in: the scent of pine needles and sex.

“I understand.” And he does, really. There’s that look in his eyes, however, that suggests there’s one thing that he cannot release back into the ether that easily. His hands find her hips, holding her against him as he sways. “Will you wear the ring?”

There’s a pause as Regina both tests the idea and his resolve. If she agrees to this, will there be another slowly built-up proposal? She can’t imagine he’d do that, and must see for herself (in his face, or the way he touches her with such reverence) that she no longer has to be selfish with her trust.

She nods her head, and feels all of a sudden invigoratingly lighter.

“Yes.”

Robin’s grinning mouth returns to hers, and he lifts her again, if only briefly (if only so that he can tip his head back and bask in his own elation without them having to part), until her feet leave the ground.

It isn’t quite what he’d thought he wanted, but there’s no room in his heart for complaints. His proposal was refused, their evening almost ruined, and yet he has the woman he loves in his arms, and the other half of their family is expected to return in the morning, and Robin just can’t find it in himself to care.

 

Later, when others see the ring and comment, asking Regina when the wedding is, she will smile conspiratorially at her fiancé and answer, “Indefinitely.”


End file.
